Wednesday, April 16, 2014

Wednesday: Your Job May Be Mandatory, But Giving A Crap Is Optional.

Well, it freaking snowed last night, which is a major setback to my carefully curated spring training program, because how the hell am I going to win back all my my Paris-Roubaix course KOMs from Niki Terpestra?

It's oddly inspiring that the so-called "Queen of the Classics" has been relegated to the status of Strava segment.

This of course is a completely insane thing to worry about, even by Lennard Zinnian standards, though the responses from the various manufacturers are pretty hilarious:

From Shimano:This is more complicated than it might first appear.As you’re aware, due to the extreme variables in usages and conditions among users, Shimano does not provide fixed periodic replacement recommendations on any non-wearing components. While I’ve personally never witnessed any of our skewers break, my suggestion is to inspect it periodically and if it looks visually flawless, continue to use it for the life of its matching (original) hub/wheel. When replacing with a new hub or wheel, it’s probably safer not to reuse the old QR.— Wayne StetinaVP of R&D, Shimano American Corp.

Translation: it's actually not complicated at all, and to be honest we've never even thought about it, but now that you mention it, yes, you do need to buy new skewers.

Anyway, now that the bicycle industry has discovered a new and lucrative source of Fredly anxiety, expect articles about the dangers of mixing hubs and skewers from various manufacturers in every major cycling periodical within the next six months.

Meanwhile, bro-duder dude-bros are still bro-duding and duder-bro-ing around in the mountains on their stupid track bikes:

Apparently these are the last four bro-dudes on the entire planet of Earth who have not yet heeded the entire Internet's advice to get a freaking road bike already. These four stragglers aside, it's remarkable how quickly the fixed-gear fad spun itself out and moved on to bikes with brakes and gears. I choose to attribute this to the elegant simplicity of the bicycle as a machine--which, for all the overpriced crabon gewgaws and Kickstarter nonsense, leaves little room for affectation. The simple fact is that you can only ride up and down a mountain pass on a brakeless track bike so many times before you're forced to admit you're an idiot, and that the entire enterprise becomes infinitely more enjoyable with the simple addition of a few hundred grams of componentry. Remember this doofus?

You gotta figure that by now even he has realized that by the time you skid through eight or ten high-end Contis you could have paid for some pretty decent clicky integrated brake lever-shifter thingies like the ones they use in the Tour de France.

Anyway, the aforementioned duderbros are featured in a video that someone "Tweeted" at me, and I couldn't watch the whole thing because it made me physically ill:

As far as 21st century quasi-rustic overly fashion-conscious douche-wallahism goes, this bears all the hallmarks, including staring slackjawed at a fucking tree like you've never seen one before:

("Whoa.")

Directing your friend in the stupid flat-brim hat's attention to the same tree:

("Whoa.")

Pointless whittling serving only to dull the expensive knife you wear on your belt as an affectation:

(Uh, if you need something pointy, why not just use the fucking knife?)

And of course asymmetrical haircuts:

("Hey dudes, don't worry, I'll be done with the useless pointy stick in just a few more minutes.")

Not to be outdone, flat-brim brodude starts chopping the shit out of a log with an artisanal axe:

I know there is no god, because if there is he would have chopped off his foot:

Also, granted I'm no outdoorsman (I prefer my woodland adventures to include handy access to shopping malls), but I think that wet log is going to make for some pretty shitty firewood:

("Isn't this [cough] great [cough] [cough] [sputter]?")

Which I guess is why they just said "Fuck it" and used the fireplace back at the hotel instead:

It's not all dudes and bros, though. There's also a token female whose only role in the video is to be sexually assaulted in the woods:

I think the word "hipster" officially became obsolete when they finally all morphed into fraternity brothers in slightly different clothes.

After that it's all panties and bikes, including the obligatory "cyclocross" shot:

What he's doing with that bike is the equivalent of what the other guy was doing with the knife.

Ultimately, I had a hard time figuring out exactly what the video was trying to sell me, which is a shame, because if I ever unwittingly buy any product featured in it I'm going to chop off my own foot with an artisanal axe--and I do, thanks to Rivendell, have an artisanal axe:

Seriously, though. My SO bought me this 10" "camping knife"/machete for Christmas and I still haven't figured out what to do with it yet. I agree with you wholeheartedly about most people carrying blades as an affectation. I wield my mailbox key as deftly as most friends and co-workers utilize their Gerbers and Benchmades to open their Amazon packages.

This is a sign that we can no longer mock stupid people. When I was a kid if you did something stupid or looked stupid we pointed at you and laughed. This I believe kept people from looking stupid later in life and actually helped them.

funny one today. It is amazing to me that out of all of the guys / girls who were in and made this video not one of them said "hey duders, don't you think this is kind of douchey and makes us all look like a bunch of pretentious fey posers?"

I'm sure the discussion of skewer safety will go one for at least 30 pages on Beikforums, and conclude it's all gone wrong due to the communist Chinese and when we stopped making murican steel skewers in Pennsylvania. If you don't carry at least 3 extra skewers in your Rapha fanny pack, you deserve to die.

Meanwhile, I gave my new fork dropouts a lawyer labiaplasty this week.

Lenny's column reminds me of the aluminum frame era, when people were convinced all those Cannondales were going to asplode in 600 miles, somehow ignoring the 100% use of aluminum in wheels and cranks for the previous four decades...then Lenny would pipe up about aluminum fatigue, quoting numbers from pure elemental aluminum, which of course has never been used in bikes. I'm on the fence about skewer safety, like many things, I won't decide until I hear from Jenny McCarthy's educated perspective.

The Velonews article has a great quote from Tom Ritchey:Structurally, I’ve never seen a Ritchey skewer fail in fatigue. So personally, I would only be looking for any degraded functionality as a reason to discontinue use. However, you will want to follow the manufacturer’s recommendation.— Tom RitcheyFounder, Ritchey

The CPSC norms even say that the skewer should leave a permanent footprint on the fork/frame dropouts (which is not possible on titanium dropouts!). If those grooves are worn out, they will not ensure that grip and permanent footprint.

Yes indeedy. Mock all you want, but the implication was that at least one of the duder-bros was getting some quality poonage (rhymes with bougienage). That's not something you take lightly at my age (rhymes with Cabot-Lodge).

The only thing that could have made that video worse is, well, nothing. It was already as nauseating as it possibly could be. The only thing that could have made it better is if they all had dangerously old skewers on their bikes and crashed off a cliff to their deaths.

Good Lob, I have an old Shimano skewer with a newer Shimano hub on my bike right now. I had to swap out my rear wheel last week due to spoke failure. Please calm my fears "pro mechanics", am I going to die on my ride home?

This is what I kept thinking to myself while watching that video. Only made it halfway through. Was there a point to it?

Wow! I thought I was over-doing it a bit with an average 369 km/week, but Terpestra is at 779! Huh. I totally suck. He is doing that in 21 hours, whereas it takes me 17 to ride half as far. But I embody Stravadouchewallahism.

Dosnoventa is laughing all the way to the bank. The mindless video seems to capture the zeitgeist of many young people who are as lost and self-righteous as their parents. "God is gonna cut you down" sums that up.

I like the skewer strain checker though. Sorry fatigue checker. Better still, why don't we go all "structural engineering" on your buttocks and hook up some muh-fuggin strain gages and tensiometers to everybody's QR skewers, and have it send real-time data (Bluetooth of course) to a COCKpit readout.

The pointlessness is as essential to the manufactured, veneer authenticity as the washed-out colors. Introducing an explicit purpose would bring all that vague romance into apposition with the real world. To wit, the world of jobs, uncool people, and plastic things.

Massive eye-roll when I saw him chopping through that giant, rotten log like that. Seriously, don't stand on the fucking thing while you're chopping it. And with that 'ax' you'll be chopping till judgement day - get a freaking saw.

As things typically progress, here on the opposite end of NY State fixies are still grownig in popularity. Every two or three years a new cache of 19 year old breakless daredevils take the streets while last years fixie kids hang their bikes up for good as they realize that they cannot grow back new knees and collarbones.

"The pointlessness is as essential to the manufactured, veneer authenticity as the washed-out colors. Introducing an explicit purpose would bring all that vague romance into apposition with the real world. To wit, the world of jobs, uncool people, and plastic things."

Indeed! A world where people chop wood because it's fucking cold out. And where you actually have to keep going with your spindly little-girl arms until a piece sufficiently small for your fireplace is separated from the rest of the trunk! Nobody sees the romance in that? Sheeeit.

I was looking at Fred Flintstone's car that he drives and was wondering how the rear wheel (roller) stays on. There must be a quick release skewer that I can't see. If there is it must be time to change it.

I've got nuts, or should I say that I run solid axles on some of my bikes and they've got nuts. Funny thing is though I've broken three solid style types axles over the years and never had any problems with my skewer style ones. Mind you when they fail the wheel just starts rubbing on the chainstay or fork and I live on to complain about it .

That's it then, liberal arts graduates "discovering" things that a lot of us see and do on a regular basis in the course of living our lives.

In their precious, over-protected youth these things become awe-inspiring. Unfortunately for those of us who are subjected to their oeurve, maybe they lacked the kind of fathers, mothers and grandparents who could have showed them the what, why, how and where of using handheld cutting tools.

Thus we get a guy standing on a wet log hacking at it between his feet with an axe and we're supposed to think it art.

Next time you ride at "Woo Hoo" speed, imagine that your front skewer is overtightened and is about to snap like a chewed-up drive-side spoke that was maimed after you took off your plastic spoke protector.

I've actually broken a skewer before. QR head came off and the skewer shot out of my bike like an arrow. It was a symptom of my freehub body on my XTR hub coming off and seizing the axle. Life's tough sometimes.I was fine, thanks for asking, as I was wearing a helmet. I didn't fall or anything like that but you know, the helmet helped. Now I replace my QRs whenever I break them. Which so far has only been once. Good policy though to replace broken ones.

I also used an axe this weekend. Mind you it was while I was doing yardwork. I don't think I looked nearly as cool as that guy in the video randomly chopping a huge log. Perhaps next weekend I can try again with a new artisanal axe instead of my dad's old one. And some new clothes. Apparently chopping wood in old clothes isn't cool anymore. Does Rapha make wood-chopping attire. I do like Rapha.

Enough of that futile hacking and hewing! The four bro-duder dude-bros should get Paul Bunyan to join with their merry troupe, though it might be a challenge for them to teach Babe how to master the skills of fixie riding.

One advantage to having quick release hubs was that when your axle broke, and they all did, the skewer kept things together so you could limp home. A solid axle allowed the stays to spread thus spilling bearings out or worse.

One time, the rusty handlebar on my old Schwinn two speed kick back broke in half while I was riding back from the Dairy Queen with a sack full of Dilly Bars. I almost died. Really, someone should have told me to replace them, but at the time I was the pro mechanic and should have known better.

Thank you Anonymous @ 3:02. You see, I do learn something about bikes here and not just the sexual perversions of all the usual suspects. Excuse me please though because I think my nuts need to be fiddled with yet again.

Steel does not fatigue under continuous load, be it tension or compression. Metal fatigue happens under cyclic loading. The term they are looking for is creep, which isn't going to happen to a skewer. Ever.

P.S. My oldest skewer is a steel Campagnolo jobbie from about 1984. 30 years of continuous use and you know what, it still works.

P.P.S. I've raced against Lennard Zinn back in the day, his bike was always falling apart.

P.P.P.S. Lennard Zinn used to paint bikes in his basement. You could tell it was a genuine Zinn paint job by the embedded black Newfoundland dog hair.

Regular Guy, you reminded me... on a ride with a colleague, i noticed his wheel wobbling wildly, i offered to fix it for him... and on releasing the QR, i noticed his axles had snapped in half... damn right, he was riding with just the QR holding his hub together...

One day I was riding my Argon 18 Krypton with Campagnolo Centaur components, Schwalbe Lugaro tires and a BBB stem when suddenly, without warning, I broke wind... I almost died. Someone should have told me the burrito was a bad idea

Cadardi, I always though it was crevice corrosion with stainless bits.

In June I and six other Freds will trust our autumnal lives to a "bike" from the 1980s in a hilly, 800 mile "classic". Too old for any splintering crabon, but plenty of dodgy aluminum, including one important vertical piece about 55' high, held up by equally sketchy steel. At least if we go down during a sprint, we won't take out the pack.

I don't know about that ax but the greatest hammer I ever put a swing to was a 16 oz Titanium Stiletto with a curved hickory handle. Beautifully balanced like a fine sword, with all the apparent driving force of a hammer twice it's weight.

If i'd have called it 'artisan' the roofer to whom it belonged may have beat me to death with it and buried me under one of the condos.

I, for one, am releived to know that Niki has legitimized his Paris Roubaix™ win by posting it to Strava. Because, if it's not on Strava, it didn't happen.Mind you, he didn't use a power meter, so it's probably all an elaborate hoax anyway.

FWIW, if you're using those new hollow skewers Snob was talking about a while back, you should replace them after every ride.

Andy Cigarettes? More like Andy Awesome! No, not really, just felt like typing that for some inexplicable reason.

Ton up by lunch time on the left coast. Impressive. Let me add to the anecdotal by saying I broke a skewer once, but I was just putting the wheel back on after fixing a flat, so there was no harm done except to my feet on the long walk home. It was a cheap piece of shit to begin with I think, and was at least ten years old. Meanwhile in the Grauniad, style (in the first photo) and lack of style (except in the photo). Which would you rather embody?

you could do with a little West Coast pied a terre. When can I expect you?

Last time I was in Vancouver I looked at a condo, I stepped into the tiny elevator and asked the lady, "do you know which floor the model suite is on?" She said, "I don't know asshole, get out of my condo".

You're right, crevice corrosion could lead to a failure, but the VeloSnooze article referenced fatigue. My campy skewer isn't stainless though, so I'm not too worried.

But, if you over-tightened your QR skewers, repeatedly several times an hour it would be possible to create a fatigue crack in, ummm...carry the 2...uhhhh, just before the end of the universe. Give or take.

What? You have a problem paying half a million dollars for a broom closet? They keep saying we're headed for a correction, but even when the rest of the world corrected, we didn't.

Mind you, when I lived just outside London ten years ago, people were saying exactly the same thing about property there. (Someone even sold an old 250 sq ft broom closet in Kensington for a couple hundred thousand pounds!) In 2008 some of my friends over there lost as much as 30% of the value of their property within the span of a few weeks, though, so clearly anything is possible.

Really, when you think about it, we're all just lucky to be alive. Plain and simple and as obvious as the nose on your face.

It's a dangerous world out there, especially for cyclists. You never know when your crank might give out on you, but you DO know that it will surely happen when you're giving it everything you've got, and when it does, it'll prolly kill ya.

On a short steep pitch, I stood up to dance on the pedals. The rear skewer slipped, the rear wheel shifted & wedged against the seat stays. I was stopped dead ibn my tracks, couldn't unclip & fell to my right in a ditch...on top of some recently raked leaves. On inspection, the cheap internet skewer's teeth were worn down. Why was I riding a $10 skewer? I killed the original item that came with my bike...I had it on loosely to hold the cassette tool in place & destroyed it while turning the tool with a wrench (spastic move)..I bought a second-hand shimano at one lbs, that was stolen a year later at another lbs when I got a wheel rebuild...they gave me a campy skewer that hurt my hand, so I bought a nice cheap one with a broad flipper that didn't hurt when I pushed on it. Spend 20 bucks, get a decent one. Don't find yourself upside down in a ditch.

First, you must determine if the threads on your skewers are rolled or cut... Your LBS can perform this simple inspection for only $10 per skewer.

I'm surprised bike component manufacturers haven't adopted the Bell Helicopter philosophy, EVERYTHING is life limited. Replace after N-million cycles. No questions asked. Your front skewer goes thru more cycles than the rear, especially if you drive your car everytime you go for a ride. Freds around here drive 30 miles roundtrip to go on a flat 10 mile boring bike ride on a trail. Just think how much safer that QR skewer would be, if you didn't put the bike on a roof rack everytime you go for a ride.

Finally clicked on that we were never born vid. Apparently it's not a dayglo abortions video. Huh. Then, for the first 60 seconds, I thought I was sitting through a Molson Canadian beer commercial I couldn't skip past. Turns out it just went downhill from there. Well, unless the end was really awesome, because I didn't make it that far.

Dear Bikesnobnyc from Dubrovnyc.What does "wallahism" means? Is it related to the word "valach" which is an ancient name they used to call Romanians like me? (It comes from the same indo-european root which gave "Wales" and means something like "foreigner").Secondly, it is with the utmost respect that I dare to have the insolence to ask you: why are you putting down fixed-gear bikes so much? Sheldon Brown loved them and recommended them. If the fixie fad wanned, it is because people are too attached to their comfort, and prefer the artifice of gear shifting to using their muscles and will power to climb a mountain. But if wanted to climb a mountain the easy way, I would lease a Hyunday, to quote yourself. Fixed gear are not that bad. They used them a lot in the first 35 tours de France, and it is my belief that introducing the derailleur in the said Tour de France was just the beginning of the savage quest for efficiency that ultimately led everyone in this sport do dope them selves, and ruin it for us all. That being said, I'm not at all against gear-shifting. It is a good thing, especially for the elderly and the disabled, but not only for them, for everyone who wants to enjoy a ride without having to sweat or contract their muscles. It is a brilliant invention, actually. Some of my best friends AND my wife ride geared bikes. I, for one, ride a fixed gear, and love it. Why can't we all get along?Respectfully and with a deep reverence,Vlad from Bucharest

I used to know a good time girl that would hang out like couch girl. One minute we are drinkin and tokin then she would have her tits out. Then be giving a little head. Then Hutch puts his hand up her shorts. Then she is giving 2 heads. Once everyone was intrigued she dropped the panties and announced "Let's go...I ain't sucking all 4 of you fuckers off."

About Me

While I love cycling and embrace it in all its forms, I'm also extremely critical. So I present to you my venting for your amusement and betterment. No offense meant to the critiqued. Always keep riding!